AI-driven discovery of chemical synthesis - IBM Blog Research

Akihiro Kishimoto is a research staff member at IBM Research – Ireland working on a range of projects in artificial intelligence, parallel and distributed computing and search. His interest in these technical fields grew from his passion for board games. And while a student at the University of Tokyo, he and three of his fellow classmates designed ISshogi, a program to play the incredibly complex (and ancient) Japanese board game, Shogi. ISshogi won the World Computer Shogi Championships four times from 1997-2005. While studying AI at the University of Alberta, Akihiro was a member of the GAMES group (Game-playing, Analytical methods, Minimax search and Empirical Studies) in the Department of Computing Science, and worked with Jonathan Schaeffer and others to solve Checkers.